In N. Phila., profiling is a fact of life

Black men grow up understanding that being viewed with suspicion is a fact of life, said Noah Cherry, a 19-year-old sophomore at Temple University. And it did not begin with the intensive search for Police Officer Chuck Cassidy's killer.

"We're always put in the position where we have to watch what we do," Cherry said. An exercise physiology major, he said: "I'm in college, but that doesn't mean anything. The stereotype is: You can take the man out of the 'hood, but you can't take the 'hood out of the man."

Wednesday evening, he was getting a ride back to his dorm with a friend when police stopped the car at Allegheny Avenue and Broad Street.

"They saw two black guys in a green Bonneville with dark tints," Cherry said. The officers asked to see identification. His friend pulled out his military ID. "He's in the Army. He's about to ship off to Egypt."

The officers let them go with a warning that the tints on the windows were too dark.

"You've got to do your best to just stay positive," he said.

Across the city, black men say they understand the need for police to search for the man who shot Cassidy. And they get it that with few clues available, a wide net must be cast, one that will catch a lot of innocent people who don't quite fit the description: a limping, 5-foot-11, heavyset black man with a spiderweb tattoo on the left hand.

"I feel bad because he was somebody's father. A provider. And he's gone," Anthony Williams said of the slain officer. "It ain't right."

A thin, 41-year-old carpenter, Williams was hanging out yesterday afternoon on his stoop, a few blocks south of Albert Einstein Medical Center, where Cassidy was taken after being mortally wounded. He was joined by two friends, Robert Jackson and Gregory Tucker. The three men said that none of them had been stopped in the current manhunt, but that they all have felt harassed by police in the past.

"They run up on you for any reason," Williams said.

"I'm targeted everyday, but I don't worry about it," Jackson said.

"Everybody's not a criminal," Tucker said before being interrupted by the beep and wail of sirens as Cassidy's body was transported from Einstein in a police cortege flashing down Broad Street.

"Police will stop pretty much anyone," said Demetrius Mitchell. Taking a break from his job as a car mechanic, Mitchell, 26, a former National Guardsman, sat outside a Shell station in North Philadelphia yesterday, noticing a sudden change in traditional street wear.

"Not too many people are wearing black hoodies today," Mitchell said. "Whenever a description of a suspect goes out like that, you try not to wear whatever looks like it or you'll get yourself harassed."

He corrected himself. "No. Actually, I wouldn't say harassed. The police are just doing their job. I don't know what you call it. Bothered, maybe."

What upsets him, Mitchell said, is not that the city is going all out, trying to locate Cassidy's killer, but that killers who claim the lives of average citizens aren't pursued with the same urgency.

"They need to catch who they're going to catch," Mitchell said. "But if they do it, it should be for everyone. Not just an officer."

The morning that Cassidy was shot, Mitchell put on a black hooded sweatshirt and went to his neighborhood Dunkin' Donuts a little farther south on Broad Street to pick up a sausage, egg and cheese croissant sandwich.

He did not hear about the attack until late that evening, when he was at a friend's house in Upper Darby.

Suddenly, he got a series of anxious calls from his uncle, his cousins and three or four friends. "They all told me: 'Don't wear that black hoodie home!' "

He hasn't worn it since, he said.

"If I did, I'm pretty sure they'd stop me."

That's despite the fact that he's 5-foot-7 and has no tattoos on his hand. Just on his forearms, including the initials of a friend who was murdered a few years ago, alongside a gravestone marked R.I.P.